Picture a 100% renewable grid. Sounds pretty darn nice, if you ask me - a thing of science fiction. Cleaner air, more affordable electricity, an intangible collective satisfaction.
A lot of pieces have to come together; it’s not as simple as deploying more solar and wind as brilliant as those technologies are. Why? Well, sometimes it’s cloudy and sometimes the wind is not blowing. This flavor of energy generation is called intermittent renewable energy and it’s necessary to balance these generation sources with controllable, or dispatchable, energy sources. To date, a lot of new dispatchable generation capacity has been natural gas because of how it pairs with these intermittent renewables.
But natural gas - curse the marketing genius who came up with that red herring of a name - is a major contributor to greenhouse gas. Methane (the actual gas in “natural gas”) is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. My personal take is that “methane bad.”1 Batteries have also been touted as an option to smooth intermittent generation, but the amount needed vastly exceeds the amount of materials we can possibly mine.
Lo, there is another kind of energy that fills this role! Hydropower is poised to be an important component of a renewable grid because of its storage via dispatchability and the fact that it… already exists! Its fuel, instead of natural gas’ methane, is the potential or kinetic energy of water. Insight into the future of how much “fuel” (read: water) will be available in the future is crucial for hydropower’s flexibility. We’re proud to support hydropower’s role in a 100% renewable grid with HydroForecast. Happy Hydropower Day!
1. As of January 2020, U.S. electricity generation produces close to 4 trillion kilowatt hours. 61% of that generation still comes from coal and natural gas, the latter increasing by over 40% since 2014. As coal plants shut down at a rapid pace, a rush to build gas-fired plants is embraced by a significant portion of investor-owned utilities. With any capital expenditure at the scale of building a new power plant, it’s based on the assumption that it will be used for decades. Gas infrastructure that’s built today will likely be generating for 30 years. And even more worrying is the scale at which methane is leaked throughout the lifecycle of natural gas energy generation. An aside, “natural gas” was a brilliant marketing decision, since methane is recognized as roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide. The leaks in natural gas distribution infrastructure in Massachusetts is estimated to make up 10% of its total emissions. Just leaks! The Los Angeles suburb of Porter Ranch leaked 800 tons of methane into the air each day for a period of 2016 - many factors of 10 more than the leaks in MA.
